


Church of the Lost Cause

by Zagzagael



Category: Sons of Anarchy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 00:56:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1246666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SPOILERS THROUGH THE SEASON SIX FINALE.</p><p>Happy Lowman wants to love someone worthy. The one woman who embodies both whore and madonna in his eyes is Tara. He wants to save her. From the MC.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Church of the Lost Cause

Happy knew the rules. The laws. The god-damned club commandments. They were of Biblical proportion to his Catholic mind. 

_You don’t mess with another brother’s Old Lady._

And although it certainly wasn’t first on the list, it was up there, and the consequences probably worse. Unless you actually wanted your head kicked in and your nuts cut off. It was simple, clear, to the point. You just don’t do it. Do. Not. Do it.

And yet. Nothing was truly that simple. Not really. You had to render yourself partially blind to see the world without any grey. He had worked hard in his forty odd years to create a simpler life. Something that he could comprehend entirely with clearly defined edges to it so that he never got confused about which side he was standing on. And neither would anyone else. 

He had never once considered another brother’s Old Lady or even current crow eater. Until. 

Tara.

The Princess, the Future Queen. 

It had made no sense, in his black and white sensibilities, when she appeared from seemingly out of nowhere. A teenage puppy love returned. How often did that happen? And Jax, married to a junkie, a purveyor of prostitutes and porn stars. Happy just could not figure out this elegant and educated woman and that made her of interest to him. He needed his surroundings, and those around him, to be of classifiable recognition. He didn’t recognize Dr. Knowles as an inherent part of the SAMCRO Life and that brought his attention to a narrower and narrower focus. He was drawing a bead on this young woman, getting her in his sights, and using his gun eye to keep her within range. 

He would watch her from his steely, narrowed gaze. Listen to her measured words. She was instinctually cautious around the MC. He respected this. He could see her when she was absent, on runs, at parties, in Ireland. He would strain to see her at those times because Jax revealed most of his baser instincts in such situations and that negative impression painted the girl-woman in mysterious degrees of shadow. She must have known about the transgressions of her partner and what did that say about her? Why had she cleaved herself to such disloyalty and disregard? The more Happy observed and studied, the more he moved away from the side of the prince and into the bowered garden of this errant princess. 

And then half the Club went to Stockton. 

***

After the Russians put a hit out on the SAMCRO VP, and the Prince got shived while standing in line for a phone call, of all things, the situation got serious. The Club realized they had been floating on ephemeral clouds and when everything dissolved beneath their asses, they found themselves on the ground trying to catch their collective breaths. Happy was assigned guard duty and the brothers had enough pull amongst the screws to get bunks reassigned. Juice ended up with Clay and Happy found himself standing inside of Jax’s cell wondering how in the hell he would be able to suffer the bottom bunk. He narrowed his eyes and straightened his shoulders and manned up.

Neither of them knew that this roommate relationship would last thirteen months and be the beginning of Happy Lowman’s undoing.

***

Jax Teller liked to talk, long into the shrinking hours of the night. He would talk the sun up if allowed. Happy could be suffered to listen. And although he would have classified most of Teller’s ramblings to a kind of boasting, when the subject of Tara Knowles surfaced he let the stories, the anecdotes, the words, the graphic descriptions fall from the bunk above as though rain in the desert. As the weeks passed he became a master of steering the conversation back to Tara, coaxing more and more explicit detail out of the boy king who was eager to hear his own voice, willing to share. Those things that should be unspoken, the movements, gestures, shapes, smells, experiences. Jackson’s tongue was not forked, just loose, his loyalties lay with his brother and not with his woman.

Happy would drone all other talk to a white noise. He was listening only for Tara. He wanted the purity, the clean lines, the seemingly perfect form of her, holding it at the center of his mind. She became a kind of Madonna and Whore for him to worship and desire while he did his soft time. 

He could sense the deeply ingrained reasons Jax did not hold her aloft. She had become dull, no longer shiny. A burdened responsibility in the same way the MC was, his sons were, his brothers. She was simply part of the whole and he was an immature man who had been told he was the center of the world when he was a boy and all else was pressed against the rim, away from the hub of his existence. 

Happy was not a book-learned man, but he was savvy enough to understand the psychology of his cellmate. Teller had been born to love a woman with edges hard enough to cut. The soft outline of Knowles weren’t injurious enough, she was nothing like Gemma, or his ex-wife, or the brittle crow eaters he seemed to prefer. And if Happy took that thought to a personal place, he realized that he saw elements of his own devout Catholic mother in Tara. Her arms meant to hold, her heart to open, her tongue to soothe, her body to offer respite. She represented the idea of love and in his secret heart of hearts, Happy Lowman wanted to love and be loved.

He began to find his spine bending in longing for this woman. During prison visits, he would sit on the far end of the visitation room with Chibs, or Opie, or one of his family members and watch Knowles with his hooded gaze. Not raptor, not executioner, but in the disguise of such . He watched her during the long months that she moved through her fecund pregnancy and he would wake sweating from dreams of her coupled with him, the great round belly, hard with her unborn child, her breasts heavy. His head would swim with this vision. He had never fathered a child, had never bedded a pregnant woman. But in his dream state, he was Tara’s lover and the father of all her children. 

After she had given birth to Jackson’s second son, Happy avoided visits for weeks. Spending that hour in the yard, working his body to screaming pain, lifting heavier and heavier weights over his head.

***

He wasn’t sure if she was scared of him or if she was simply scared of everything. Now. She seemed to tremor in a kind of bone-shook fear all of the time and when he saw this it hurt him. He watched as Jax distanced himself from her and although part of him rejoiced in this estrangement, he felt her sadness and confusion heavy in his own chest. 

More and more he found himself gritting his teeth to the point of migraine. It was taking every striated muscle in his body to keep from choking the breath out of Teller, grabbing Tara by the hand and pulling her out of the Life and into a new life with him.

The killer with the heart of gold. The penitent trigger. It was ridiculous. 

***

He had given up crow eaters. For Lent. And then it became his penance. He wanted to wear a hair shirt, the cilice, flagellate with the ripping strap. 

He wanted to itch, suffer, and bleed for her. He wanted her to absolve him. Cleanse him. Make him new, form his body, his mind, into the image that melded with hers.

He had dreams in which he was kneeling before the altar, dressed all in white, even his shoes, he was nine years old receiving the sacrament of his First Communion. In some of the dreams she was beside him, in others she was the Eucharist on his tongue.

***

When she returned from County, he broke his silence. He was waiting for her in the hallway, having seen her when she walked through the Clubhouse towards the bathroom. The boys were out in the play yard with Unser, Gemma feinting about, and Jax in between the open legs of the prostitute madam. 

Nothing slipped past him. He saw everything. Felt the betrayals in the joints that held his long bones together, felt the rage in the knuckles of both hands. Dreamt dreams in which he was the bullets loaded into the clip, the blade in the sheath. 

He waited for her, leaning his broad shoulders against the wall across from the door of the dorm room, one foot up behind him, arms crossed loosely over his chest.

She startled violently when she came out of the doorway, one slender hand over her heart, and his own heart sympathetically slammed into his ribs. 

“Sorry,” he apologized.

And she relaxed, her face brightened, her shoulders pulled back. He straightened and stood in front of her. His chest was aching.

She tilted her head in quiet question. 

“What in hell happened to your hair?”

Her hand came up, catching at the ragged edges of it. She bit her lip and narrowed her eyes at him and he knew. Everything. Prison bitches. Her beautiful hair. Her fear and then her resignation. 

He nodded, forced his face to soften. “You got any names?”

She shook her head. “Please. It’s okay.”

“The fuck it is.”

He was surprising her; he could see it in her expression. “You’re the only one who has seemed to notice,” she said softly.

“I notice you.”

She tipped her head, re-assessing him, he assumed. Then she smiled and it was so bitter he almost grimaced. “Jail sucks, huh?” 

This surprised him and he laughed, nodding. And the sound of his laughter seemed to surprise her and she laughed in response and they smiled at one another. 

“It does.”

He watched her sober then grow serious. 

“I,” she bit her lip and looked down the dark hallway before looking back at him. “I can’t go back, Happy. I just can’t.” Her voice caught in her throat and he had to shove his hands deep into his front pockets.

“Yeah. I know.”

_Come with me, Tara. Please God, come away with me. I’ll take care of you. I’ll protect you from anyone who would ever do you harm. I would shelter you from anything that would endanger you. You could teach me how to love._

“Um, the boys. I have to get back out there.” She paused. Then she stepped completely into his space, brought her hands up to either side of his neck. On tiptoe she pressed her lips against his cheek and whispered something into his ear. It was an agony that he could not clearly hear what she had told him.

***

_With the fiercest physical need he had ever experienced, he wrapped her in his arms, pulling her nearly off her feet and against his body. With a fluid turn he had her back pressed against the hallway wall, bending his knees, holding her head between his palms, kissing her, his tongue wide and flat and deep inside her mouth. He was moaning her name, over and over. He was going to take her, right there in the Clubhouse, her children playing on the swing set outside, the evil witch of a mother in law sharing a toke with the broken down police chief. The betraying husband crawling like a sin on the body of a sinner._

_There was no beastliness in his desire to join himself with her. He was going to elevate her, ascend with her. He would pull her legs up around his hips, join his body with hers, fast against the vault of Heaven. He reached down and caught her behind the backs of her knees. They were both unclothed, the hallway lit by stars and comets. He tipped his head back and felt her teeth graze the curving bone of his jaw. Her hands wrapped around his cock, guiding him._

_The universe exploded around them and their bodies seeded galaxies. Creating worlds anew._

He woke alone in his bed, panting, his body arching into an orgasm.

***

It was the end of everything. This morning, this Church, this calling to arms of the family destroyed. Happy sat at the reaper and seethed. Jax was throwing silver on the table, and even though he said the intent was to talk calm sense into his missing wife, bring her around, Happy heard the devil in the details. 

He would find her first. 

***

He knew the bike was a roaring tip off. He drove once past the small motel and saw her SUV. He parked at the 7-11, folded his cut into the saddlebags, stuffed his Desert Eagle into the back of his waistband and pulled his t-shirt down over that. He took a great heaving breath and began the long walk back down the highway. 

She was waiting for him outside the door of the room. He could see her looking through the late night for him. He approached her without pause.

She was crying. 

“Shhhh,” he shushed her. 

But she shook her head and pressed her knuckles against her teeth. “Please, don’t let the boys see this.”

He stopped, mid-step, her words, her meaning, a taser to the chest. He thought he came in the guise of her knight, her angel, her protector. She saw only the eliminator.

He bowed his broad shoulders, bent his head in abject apology. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

She didn’t believe him.

“I would never hurt you, Tara.”

“But?”

“Never.”

He watched her hold her breath, let her study him. He stepped closer, palms up, the supplicant. He worshipped her. He could feel the hinges of his knees bending before her. 

“Happy?” she asked and his name in her mouth, on her tongue, was consecrated. He knew she could see him now. For what he was, for how he loved her. 

He nodded and then she was in his arms. 

But that was all a delusion. He caught Abel at the bottom of the slide and looked back over to the cement picnic table where Jax and Tara sat across from one another, hunched over the pain they had piled between them. She was not his. 

He was the ascetic. 

He could not save her from her dark destiny. Her sacrifice would baptize them all in blood.

**Author's Note:**

> For those who've been following my fics about Tara these past few months, I do realize that I'm beginning to go off the rails trying to find some canon character to save Tara already! Save her! And I know that there is a group of fans who can't stand Tara, so this isn't for them. It's for those of us who identify with her and feel that Sutter did the character and her fans a serious wrong with the Season 6 finale. 
> 
> I know, I know, Happy Lowman??? Just trying him on. He is smexy as hell but probably not....plausible here. Heck, I'd ship Tara/Chuckie if I could think of a way for him to rescue her from her destiny.


End file.
